“Nothing in biology…”: The most used and abused quotation in evolutionary biology

Quotations are everywhere. You can always pretend you know something about physics by quoting Einstein: “God does not play dice“. Or if you feel like contributing to a discussion about statistics you can assert that “all models are wrong, but some are useful. There’s a quotation for every occasion. In fact, Oxford University Press (OUP) has its own dictionary of quotations. (Although OUP has a dictionary for pretty much anything.) But if one quotation has been mercilessly abused, it has been that of Dobzhansky. You know which one, the one starting with “Nothing in biology…”.

It all began when Theodosius Dobzhansky became the president of the American Society of Zoologists. In his presidential lecture he raised some concerns on the emerging field of molecular biology, of which he said it was a ‘glamour field’. He worried that ‘[t]he notion has gained some currency that the only worthwhile biology is molecular biology. All else is […] “butterfly collecting”‘, in clear reference to Rutherford’s “stamp collecting” statement. Towards the end of his address, he concludes that molecular biologists focus more on ‘how things are’, and organismic biologists on ‘how things got to be that way’, but that both views are complementary, and a Darwinian approach is needed to understand also molecular biology. In his words: ‘nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution, sub specie evolutionis‘.

Nothing in Dobzhansky makes sense except in the light of taxonomy

The ending of the sentence, ‘in the light of evolution, sub specie evolutionis‘, originally comes from Julian Huxley. He paraphrased Spinoza, who described all the things that are universal and eternally truth as sub specie aeternitatis (from the point of view of eternity). Huxley coined the concept of sub specie evolutionis and translated it as ‘in the light of evolution’. But Dobzhansky slightly modified his own version of the sentence and use it as a title of a very influential paper he published in 1973, introducing to the World what it will become his most famous statement: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution“. The nightmare began!

In any case, I think we all have created a version of Dobzhansky’s ‘Nothing in X makes sense…’. I’ve seen hundreds of different versions, particularly in conferences and seminars. They all look clever to the eyes of the author, but probably not as much to the audience. Like this blog, which I always try to do my best, but I’m aware that most readers do not care much about what I write. After all, nothing in this blog makes sense except in the light of its author, sub species Antonii.

One Response to ““Nothing in biology…”: The most used and abused quotation in evolutionary biology”

Great blog! So many fads like this enter scientific writing. But it is so tempting when trying to say something amusing in an otherwise dull paper. How many Holy Grails are there in science? In ecology in the 1970s and 80s it was a fad to start papers with a title “On …..” (not sure if it started with de Wit’s “On competition” or whether it pre-dates that). Roger Cousens